


The Painter

by softlybarnes



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1930s, Alternate Universe - Artists, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-27
Updated: 2019-11-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 23:46:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21587743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softlybarnes/pseuds/softlybarnes
Summary: She’s smoking outside the bodega the day she spots him for the first time. A glimpse of his face through a tiny crack in the crowd shuffling past the store front. She wouldn’t have noticed him at all, had her friend not paused in her long ranting monologue about the pointlessness of modern prose to point him out.Or.Bucky falls hopelessly in love with an artist the second she notices him. 1930s/artist au.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Reader
Comments: 1
Kudos: 56





	The Painter

**Author's Note:**

> Here it is! The much promised artist fic! Please let me know what you think and as always thank you so much for reading!

She’s smoking outside the bodega the day she spots him for the first time. A glimpse of his face through a tiny crack in the crowd shuffling past the store front. She wouldn’t have noticed him at all, had her friend not paused in her long ranting monologue about the pointlessness of modern prose to point him out.

A quick pause, an inhaled breath, an adjustment of the wide frames of her glasses. “Ain’t he a looker?”

He _is_.

Boyish beauty, pink lips, muscled shoulders and tan skin that speaks to many hours laboring in the sun.

She pushes away from the wall she leans against, following him down the sidewalk and leaving Alice behind who doesn’t even seem to notice she’s gone until she’s too far away to stop her.

She lifts her fingers to her mouth, lips sealing around the cigarette in her hand as she carefully treads behind him, noticing for the first time that his gait is slightly off kilter. He’s leaning to one side, ear turned toward the shorter man beside him.

Darting through the crowd and around the pair she comes to an abrupt stop in front of them. They stop too, staring back at her for a long moment. 

Her eyes drink in the sight of him. Dark hair mussed, hatless, blue eyes bright and confused. He’s sweating, his skin a beautiful golden glow in the late afternoon light, heated. He’s absolutely angelic, perfect.

“Ma’am,” his friend says, concerned, voice scratched with the sound of sickness. “Can we help you with something?”

He sounds as though he genuinely means it.

She smiles, dropping her cigarette, crushing the end with her shoe. “Yes,” she says, gaze still locked on the blue eyes of the dark-haired man. “You’re very beautiful,” she tells him.

Shock makes his eyes go wide, pink creeping up the pretty pale skin of his neck, where the sun hasn’t yet turned him golden. “I – uh, we’re real late, miss –,”

“I’d like to paint you,” she gets straight to the point, wondering how she’d ever capture the emotion in his eyes. “You’re interesting,” she tells him, blunt without realizing, without apology.

He shakes his head, smile a bit strained now. “Sorry, ma’am,” he tries again, “We really are late for dinner at his ma’s and he just got into a scrape so we’re already trouble bound.” She realizes for the first time that the short blond has a ring of purple around his left eye, a split lip, blood on his collar.

The blond’s breathing is labored, weak.

“I can pay you.”

His demeanor changes.

He straightens.

“Bucky,” the blond warns. “No, you already –,”

“We need that money, Steve,” Bucky says, eyes still focused on hers. “What would I have to do?”

She shrugs, already shading in the stubble that might appear on his cheeks if he let it. “Just sit. Couple hours, couple times a week.”

He holds out his hand. She shakes it, fishes in her pocket for a card.

She presses it into his palm, scrawled there her address, phone number, name. “Noon. Tomorrow. Can you make it?”

“Yes,” he breathes out.

It sounds like a promise.

She smiles, tilts her sunglasses onto her face and strolls away. Happy to finally have found a new muse.

~

Bucky buzzes the bell for the apartment indicated on the much folded, very worriedly creased card in his hand at exactly noon the next day.

Steve had argued with him until midnight about the entire affair, refusing to concede that he was sick, that they very sorely needed the money, and that they were in a tight spot until Bucky got paid again, next week.

He decided to go anyways, that if the strange woman they’d met on the street didn’t actually have any money the most he’d lose is a few hours of sitting still in some kook’s apartment. And, in all honesty, a few hours of rest sounded nice, especially coming off an early morning shift at the docks.

She appears behind the colored glass pane of the apartment building’s front door suddenly, strange eyes glowing in the hot summer sun. She opens the door, hair kept back by red cloth tied tight behind her neck, face clear of any makeup, eyes wide.

It’s strange to see a dame like this, vulnerable and open in a way he’d only even seen his ma before, without makeup, hair undone. In a way he supposes men must see their wives. It makes him simultaneously embarrassed and proud.

“Come in. Follow me,” she says, smiling at him, turning away to dart up the stairs, feet bare on the wood. She’s in wide legged trousers, her blouse tucked into the high waist, pearls around her neck. Bucky shakes his head, following her heavily up the stairs. He’s never nervous around women, but he’s nervous around her, wringing his hands before he stuffs them in his pockets, wondering if he should have cleaned up before he showed up on her doorstep.

Her apartment is on the top floor, and his breath comes in only slightly sharper than normal pants as he reaches the landing that leads to her door.

She’s already disappeared inside, where he can hear her puttering around, glass knocking against wood, the sharp tap of metal against ceramic, a stool being dragged against worn floorboards.

He shuts the door behind himself, eyes nearly falling out of his head at the size of her apartment, large windows letting in the sun and setting the whole room on fire. It’s warm though, sweat already beginning to bead on the back of his neck as he whips off his hat, eyes roving over the room a second time. Sky blue walls meet while moldings, the wooden floors are scraped and aged but clean.

Chipped mugs are settled against the windowsills, stacks of canvas lean against one wall, the only furniture a bed, barstools, one table with two mismatched chairs. There’s only one other door, to what must be the bathroom.

She’s behind the kitchen counter, rinsing out a cup in the sink.

“Take off your shirt and sit on that stool.”

Bucky looks around, heat brushing up his spine, mortification thick in his chest. “I’m, uh,” he coughs, not sure how to phrase it. “Dirty,” he settles on the word with a wince, “Just came from the docks and –,”

“Doesn’t matter,” she interrupts as she moves around the counter, drying her hands delicately on a tea towel before she picks up the stool and moves it to the center of the floor.

Her fingers are adorned with several dainty rings, he notices when she crosses her arms across her chest, apparently waiting for him to comply with her directions.

Bucky swallows, shrugging off his suspenders before he goes about fumbling at the buttons of his shirt.

She watches him, head cocked to the side, and Bucky has never felt more like an idiot in front of a lady.

The worst part is, he likes that she’s watching him, he likes her eyes sliding along his skin as he reveals it to her.

He feels dizzy suddenly, off balance, drunk maybe.

But warm.

He sits down on the stool as soon as his shirt is off, waiting for her to say something.

She only stares at him, gaze appraising him the way a critic examines a painting before she reaches out and adjusts a curl of his hair, tells him to turn in his seat, his back to her.

After that she moves away, setting up her canvas and brushes and paint. Sweat drips down his spine, pools in the creases of his stomach where he’s stooped over on the stool.

“Put your feet on the bottom rung of the chair,” she says, voice gentle and very far away. He does as commanded and waits. “Do you need to smoke or use the bathroom before I start?”

“No.”

“Let me know if you become too uncomfortable.”

He nods before getting one last instruction.

“Bow your head.”

He does. He closes his eyes.

~

Bucky, whose last name she still does not know, is very good at sitting still.

He doesn’t move, ribs expanding and contracting as he breathes slowly, sweat dripping down his back and along his neck, wetting the edges of his hair. He doesn’t complain, doesn’t try to talk to her. Maybe he’s fallen asleep.

When the sun begins to shift in the sky, sinking deep into the afternoon, Bucky stretches tightly and settles again.

“You can move,” she says, lying down the brush in her hand and carefully turning her easel away from his eyes.

He turns and plucks his shirt from the floor. “So,” he begins, fingers buttoning slowly. “Do I get paid now, or –,”

“I’ll pay you at the end of each sitting,” she says.

“Oh,” he says, surprised. “You need me to sit again?”

She frowns at him. “Yes.” She’d told him that, hadn’t she?

“Okay,” he agrees, opens his mouth to say more before he abruptly snaps his mouth closed again, thinking better of whatever he was about to say.

She jerks her chin at him, and he steps close, following her to her kitchen counter where he leans against the surface. “Water?” She asks and pours him a cup from the pitcher in the icebox without waiting for an answer. He drinks it greedily; takes the money she offers him and doesn’t count it until he gets home.

“Holy shit,” Steve says when he does count it later that evening. Fifteen whole dollars, a week’s worth of wages.

~

Bucky takes the money back to her the very next day, sure there’s been a mistake.

She opens the door before he’s even knocked, fingers curled and lifted.

“I can’t take this,” he says, desperately fishing in his pockets for the coveted money.

She only stares at him when he tries to hand her the tattered bills. “Yes, you can. You sat for me.”

“No –,” he begins to protest as she closes the door and steps out onto the street with him.

“Yes. You earned it. Isn’t your friend sick?”

He stares at her, not sure how she’d known.

She lights a cigarette carefully, lips colored bright red around the filter when she inhales and then breathes out in a cloud of white smoke, pushing her sunglasses up her nose. “Tomorrow,” she says. “Don’t be late.”

~

He’s not late, he’s never late.

Bucky sits in her warm apartment twice a week for months, never really speaking to her.

She looks at him with curiosity sometimes, that never seems to bubble to the surface, gaze impenetrable.

One week she quietly adjusts the way he sits, her fingers soft against his bare skin, lighting his veins on fire, before she tips his chin up with a curled finger and asks him to look at her over his shoulder. She’s so close he could kiss her, the rose of her perfume all consuming, twisting knives into his heart. Bucky doesn’t kiss her, not sure she would appreciate it.

He looks over his shoulder at her, exactly as she asks him to, sure he’d do just about anything she asked for no reason at all.

He finds her remarkably detached for an artist, emotion he can’t quite place fracturing and spiderwebbing through her gaze so quickly he’s never really sure if it was there at all.

~

He looks tired, she thinks.

Its winter now and the sun had long ago set.

There are circles lined beneath his eyes, gaze hazy and unfocused, like he’s been working too much and sleeping too little.

She lies down her paint brush, surprise springing into his eyes as she does. “Are – are you done?” He asks hesitantly, almost fearfully.

Something strange tugs at her chest then, at the way his voice catches, graveled, the exhausted lines of his body cutting the strings of her heart. “Are you okay?” she asks, something she’s never asked any of her models before.

“Yeah,” he says. “Hey, are _you_ okay, doll?”

Something in her jolts at the pet name on his lips, a spark travelling timidly up her spine. His neck pinks but his doesn’t correct himself.

She’s not sure what prompts his question, the fact that she’s concerned about him or that she’s stopped painting.

She blinks, standing slowly from her own stool. “I’m not heartless, you know,” she tells him, moving around the kitchen counter. “I just get caught up in my art, in my own head I guess.” She waves him over, Bucky shucking on his shirt as he stands. He’s shivering too, the apartment much colder than she had realized. “I’ll make you some coffee. You’re dead on your feet.”

Bucky sits heavily at the counter, leaning his elbows against the surface.

“I’m sorry,” she concedes to him. “I should have realized earlier.”

He shoots her a smile, “No, don’t be. This is nice. Coming here, sitting for you.”

Nodding, she turns to start the coffee.

~

They drink the coffee in silence, and she seems to notice for the first time the deep chill that permeates throughout her apartment, drafty with barely any furniture.

She offers him a blanket, clears her throat, and asks, “How’s your friend? The blond one.”

“Steve? ‘s okay, I suppose.” Bucky chews his lip, thinking that if he caught pneumonia again this winter that might be the end of Steve Rogers.

She smiles at him, touching the bandana that always covers her hair when she paints. “He’s not. I hope the money helps at least.”

“It does,” he answers, watching her drink her own cup of coffee down bitter and black and hot. “You grow up in Brooklyn?” He asks her, not sure why.

“No,” she says with a grin. “I found my crowd here. Artists of all kinds. Interesting folk. Though, I think you knew that.”

He nods. “You’re rich.”

Her laugh is like a bell, a small tinkle in his ears. Bucky straightens when he hears the sound, not sure he’s ever heard her laugh before, a grin slowly pulling across his face.

“My parents are rich,” she corrects, smiling back at him like she can’t quite help it. “They keep thinkin’ one day I’ll see the light, come on home, marry that awful man they like so much.”

Bucky shrugs, traces his finger around the rim of his mug, not meeting her eyes, “Seems to me like that might be worth it.”

“No,” she disagrees softly. “Money doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have freedom.”

He nods, sips his coffee until its gone, and bids her goodnight.

The air doesn’t feel so cold on his walk home.

He smiles.

~

He’s forgotten his hat again.

Sleet and snow sticks to his hair, dripping an icy path down his naked spine, making him shiver where he sits. But he doesn’t complain. Bucky, last name Barnes she had found out, doesn’t make a peep, doesn’t even flinch as the ice slips over ridged, hard muscle.

For the second time in recent weeks, she lies down her paintbrush with a sigh, and shuffles up from her seat.

She finds a blanket and hooks it around his shoulders.

Bucky’s lips are blue, he nods at her in thanks.

“I’m almost done,” she tells him as she sits down across from him, watching the watery pale light of the winter sun slide across his face. “With the painting.”

What little color left in his cheeks drains away. “Got another model lined up already?”

It’s a weak joke, but she appreciates his smile all the same.

“No.” She goes quiet, watching him. He closes his eyes to her, shutting away the prettiest, deepest blue she’s ever had the pleasure to see, that she’s ever had the pleasure to paint. “Not entirely.” There’s no one else in the world quite like the man in front of her, that she’s sure of.

His lashes cast long shadows down his cheeks, winter bleached skin taut over lean muscles.

“Are you getting enough to eat?”

His eyes flash open, flicking against hers. “Yeah.”

He’s lying. She doesn’t press him, something like the fierceness of hurt pride passing behind his eyes.

“Do you celebrate Christmas?”

She not sure where the question has come from, harbored low in her belly until this very moment, so that she could lurch in out into the space between them. “Steve does,” he says, a fractured answer.

She nods, touches the sharp line of his jaw with two fingers, tracing until she lets her hand drop away. “Would you be offended if I invited you both to dinner?” She pauses, then continues after she swallows the lump in her throat. “Not on Christmas, I know you both must have family –,”

Something odd passes between them.

“Sure we’ll come,” he agrees before she can continue.

She smiles at him, and he smiles back.

~

Bucky finds a coat, exactly his size, in a box on his ma’s doorstep two days later.

The note is unsigned, but he’s left with little doubt as to who the sender is.

His ma is delighted, she tells him he looks handsome in a warm Romanian.

~

They spend the night before Christmas Eve wrapped in the warmth of her apartment, bellies full of such rich food that he and Steve are almost sick over it.

She hands over art supplies to Steve like it means nothing and costs even less. She passes Bucky a pad of paper and charcoal too, though he’s not sure why, the smile pressed over her lips making him take it from her without question.

Steve likes her.

He gets it, he says on the way home, why Bucky is so hung up on her.

Steve seems just a tad taken with her too and Bucky has to stifle the guilty jealousy that flares in his gut.

Bucky goes on as many dates as his tight schedule and limited budget will allow after that night, and still nothing washes away the feeling of her fingers pressed to the curve of his jaw, the stilting feeling of her gaze appraising him.

She looks at him as art, he reminds himself often, as a muse. A means to an end.

No matter that he spends an increasing amount of time at her apartment, as muse and as a friend.

She paints, but more often than not she brews him a cup of coffee and offers him an expensive cigarette that he hasn’t quite mastered the art of politely turning down.

She shows him a spread of artfully taken photographs, that he thinks about when he’s dancing with a girl that doesn’t hold a candle to the artist that’s always on his mind.

And then he spots her one night, laughing, arm in arm with a man that has more money then Bucky ever will.

His pride is hurt, sure, but his heart is absolutely crushed. They duck into a restaurant that Bucky will never be able to step foot in, not in a million years, not even if the world was ending. The other man pulls out a chair for her, takes her coat, seems to order for her, their table right in the window just because life has always had a way of rubbing salt into his wounds.

Just like how he seems to always be laid off from jobs right when Steve catches something that makes Bucky think this time it would happen, Steve’s soul would be shoveled off the earth with so many others, onto the conveyer belt into the great unknown.

Life has a way, it seemed, of being really rotten, all around, when it wanted to be.

He turns away from the window, the dame at his arm tugging him in a different direction, toward something they can both afford.

~

Winter passes into spring, 1938 into 1939, flowers blooming brightly along dusty New York City streets as the whispers of a new European conflict begins to stir.

Bucky can say, with confidence, that he and the artist are friends.

She bakes him a cake on his birthday, invites him and Steve and Becca over for cake and coffee. Becca doesn’t know how to hide it from their ma, stuffed full of strawberries and vanilla sponge on that dreary, rainy March day.

He’ll never be happy with it, with just friends. His blood stirs too hot in his veins when she’s around, when she trails her fingers along with inside of his forearm, adjusts his posture with gently placed fingers.

Then one day, she stops painting.

Bucky keeps coming over anyways, every day after his shift at the dockyard ends.

She smiles when she sees him, usually has something like a supper prepared for him. She asks about Steve often, about his mother and sisters.

They sit at her counter for hours, talking, drinking tea or coffee, eating delightfully rich little cakes. Whipped cream sticks to her lips, and he has to resist the urge to lean forward and lick it away. His face burns hot in those moments, when he can’t control the places his mind drifts to.

She’s beautiful, and smart, and talented.

She talks with him about anything and everything, a nice change of pace from the dreary conversations often had with guys from work.

They talk about war and politics and philosophy. About her family and his. She tells him he’s brilliant when she listens to him speak about science and mathematics, tells him it’s a shame he hadn’t gone to university.

Spring turns to Summer, Bucky is so taken with her that he can’t fool himself with dating anyone else anymore, even to distract himself from her.

And then, one fateful summer evening, windows thrown wide to the world, rain drizzling down in a warm, humid sheet, he leans across the counter and kisses her.

There isn’t even cream on her lips this evening.

Though the taste of aged scotch does burn against his tongue. She only hesitates for a moment, before her hand hooks against the back of his neck, pressing him closer to her, keeping him in place.

His eyes are wide when she finally pulls away, breathing heavily against his mouth as she leans her forehead against his.

“I’m sorry,” he says, not exactly sure why.

“I can’t imagine why,” she whispers, sounding hoarse and warm.

He shakes his head against hers, “It’ll never work.”

“Why?”

“We come from two different worlds.”

She had paid him. Seen him laid bare and shaking in her apartment as art for months. She had given him a coat and Steve hope and art supplies.

They’d never be equal.

“I don’t care.”

She sounds honest.

“I’d live in a gutter with you, Bucky Barnes.”

She still sounds honest, her eyes wide and open, vulnerable.

Bucky remembers the man at the restaurant, at the sinking feeling in his gut that he would never be a part of her life.

He kisses her again anyway, softer this time.

She makes a low noise in the back of her throat. Surprise maybe.

Bucky isn’t sure how but he moves around the counter, cages her in close against his ribs, tucking her right against his heart, which hammers against his chest in loud beats that he’s sure the whole block must be able to hear.

Her fingers curl into his shirt, hands fisted around his suspenders. She isn’t shy, not that she ever has been, tongue dipping between his lips, licking deeply into his mouth.

He’s more than happy to return her eager kisses, the warm press of her mouth against his.

It feels like a homecoming, like a feeling he’s always missed, hidden deep in the center of his bones, his very soul.

“Bucky,” she whispers his name, long artists fingers cold against his jaw. “I mean it.”

He knows she does. He nods, arms tightening around his back, fingers squeezing her sides as he turns his head to press a kiss to her palm, lips already love swollen. “I know.” Meaning something doesn’t mean it’ll work out.

“You’re good at this,” she touches his lips.

He laughs.

~

He doesn’t spend the night, though he does end up in her bed, skin pressed to heated skin, lips hungry and wet against hers.

They’re young, both of them, but he makes her feel like a kid, like his kiss is the first she’s ever tasted. 

Bucky presses curved lips against her shoulder gently, adjusting the strap of her bra before he finally climbs out of her bed.

They hadn’t done anything but neck and still the pink of a blush flushes his back, the thin skin of his neck.

He tugs on his shirt, buttons it slowly before he pulls his suspenders back into place, something she’s seen him do a million times before, and yet this time is different.

Maybe because she had left a the stain of her lipstick in the center of his chest.

He has the absolute nerve, the _gall_ , to ask, “I’ll see you tomorrow then, doll?”

She blinks, tilts her head to the side against the silk pillowcase. “Why wouldn’t you?”

Bucky smiles, kisses the tip of her nose, and ducks out of her apartment.


End file.
